Bike friendly or not ?

In reply to my previous post, a friend of mine (who doesn't live in the Bay Area) asked me if my route is really bike-friendly. Well, you can find the answer to that question at:

http://www.vta.org/schedules/gmaps/index.html

And if you overlay my route  (unfortunately I don't know how to overlap my route on top of that  bike map yet), you'll notice that a lot of it is covered by bike lanes. And except for a short stretch on Camden (and the right most lane in that section on Camden is really wide so no worries), most of my routes outside bike lane are through neighborhood streets (e.g. through Campbell), which has virtually no traffic in Saturday morning. So that route is very safe and bike friendly (there are less traffic signals on those routes as well, which helps a lot). Oh, and the route is essentially flat - there are very minor incline/declines but no hills at all, with a lot of straight runs where you can go as fast as your legs can allow.

Saturday's bike trip

Yesterday, I had the longest bike trip so far - about 21 miles (33km) from my house to Cupertino High School. 

It took me about an hour and 40 minutes - the average speed of about 12.6 miles per hour.

Considering all those stop times at numerous traffic signals, this is better than I actually expected

- 30 seconds wait at 20 signals would be 10 minutes, and that would make the average speed 14 miles per hour.

Here's the map with my route:

View Larger Map

The weird loop at the end was basically to spend time before I met my wife at

Cupertino High School - I arrived there much earlier than I expected,

so the loop became much larger than I originally planned.

Now this gives me high hope that I can bike to my work within 2.5 hour or so in the bike-to-work day next year...

Silicon Valley's road names

As a computer science geek, Silicon Valley has many "interesting" things around, and among them is the names of streets. Here's a few of them that are interesting to me:

While Semiconductor Drive in San Jose sounds like a perfect place to find semiconductor companies, you'll have better luck around Component Drive, which crosses with N. 1st Street - where you can pretty much find all major and minor semiconductor companies. Not so far from  Component Drive, you can drive through Disk Drive in San Jose, and then after just one signal away and you can hit Fortran Drive and Fortran Court right next to each other.

You don't even need to ask which company is at 1 Amd Place, Sunnyvale. Of course, there are a few giants that won't be satisfied without its name on the road sign: you can't drive through Oracle Parkway in Redmond City or Cisco Way in San Jose, and you don't even need those road names to know where you're getting into if you drive through those streets.

However, not all companies are witless and boring to make their coporate address in their own name.  The famous Infinite Loop in Cupertino is a pun for every programmers out there, although the Loop isn't really a complete loop by itself- which kind of fits the "fruit" company that is located there). Both Network Circles in Santa Clara and Menlo Park are really full circles and you can keep driving on those Circles without leaving them (they are also the address of the same company who owns network.com).